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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Chap. ^N )^ rio;lit No. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



C RELIGION IN LITERATURE AND 
RELIGION IN LIFE 



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ELIGION IN 

LITERATURE 
AND RELIGION 
INLIFE.BEING 
TWO PAPERS 
WRITTEN BY 
STOPFORD A. 
BROOKE, M.A., 
LL.D. 



THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 
NEW YORK. ANNO DOMINI MDCCCCI 



L 



Copyright, 1901, by Thomas Y. Crowell & Company 



Library of Con^rese 

Iwo Copies Bcceiveo 

FEB 16 i9ul 

_-. Copyright entry 






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,XXe.?.3x<^..^ 



} SECOND COPY 

! 



D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston 



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1 



I. RELIGION IN LITERATURE 




I. RELIGION IN LITERATURE 

T is well, when we talk 
of literature, to know 
what we mean by the 
term. It is often used 
to mean any kind of 
clever writing on al- 
most any subject. Men 
talk of scientific, crit- 
ical, theological, eco- 
nomic, journalistic lit- 
erature, of historical 
and philosophical lit- 
erature. They ought to say 'writing,' not 'litera- 
ture,* else the word literature has too universal 
a meaning. When men speak of French, Ger- 
man, or English literature, they do not include 
under these titles all that is written in these 
several nations. They only include writings 
which possess certain excellent qualities which 
differentiate them from the rest. The first of 
these is that the subject should be noble, and 
the matter weighty with thought and feeling. 
The second is that the manner should be grace- 
ful, temperate, and beautiful ; and that the shap- 
ing of the subject— that is, the form given to it 
—-should be so composed into a harmony of the 
parts with the whole, and of the whole with the 
parts, that it gives to the reader something of 
the pleasure of an unspoilt growth of nature. If 
that be so, if the form be good, then the writing 
will have a certain divine clearness; a pleasant 
individual note, charged with the character of 

I 



the writer; a happy choice of words; an *orna- 
ment' that exactly fits its place, and such sur- 
prising turns of thought and expression as sug- 
gest flexibility of thought, rapidity of fancy, and 
self-enjoyment in the writer. In one word, he 
will have style. 

Above all, the imagination must be at work in 
any writing which deserves the name of liter- 
ature. Imagination, the ^shaping spirit,' has 
much to do with the form of which I have spo- 
ken, perhaps as much as steady and slow-or- 
dered thought, for it runs and spreads through 
all such thought as the blood runs through the 
body. It is the life of literature. But its main 
power is the power of creation— the power by 
which man draws nearest to the power of God 
—the making of a new thing in the world for 
the pleasure and praise of all the spirits of the 
universe. It is not the making of a new thing 
out of nothing, as * creation* used to be defined ; 
but it is the making out of existing elements, 
by re-combining them afresh, of a complete and 
rounded thing which did not exist before. This 
is what imagination does in literature, sitting 
alone, like Prometheus, by the sea of human 
life, and in her hands turning old material in- 
to shapes as yet unknown. And she does this 
moved by the passions ; her blood, as she works, 
thrilling with sorrow or indignation, with love, 
joy, or pity, with awe or hope, according to her 
material ; but chiefly with that passion of lov- 
ing and divine joy which always accompanies, 
in noble excitement and intensity, the act of 

2 



creation when accomplished either by God or 
man. 

But the imagination, when it is not diseased, 
works in accordance with the laws of the uni- 
verse; and the result is that its creation pos- 
sesses truth. What it paints, or builds, or carves, 
or sings, or writes, is true ; goes down to the 
bottom rock of all its varied material in the na- 
tural world, and to the mother elements of the 
heart of man. 

Then, out of the whole of this work of the imag- 
ination, out of the constant love which the writer 
has felt for the ideas he has to shape, and for the 
mould into which he has thrown them; out of 
the joy with which he has been thrilled while he 
wrote them into a creation— emerges beauty, 
the outward form of love and joy. The thing is 
made, and beautifully made. 
The last result is life. Life beats in the book, the 
poem, the drama, like a tide; its force is always 
young, and passes from it like a spirit into men, 
pleasing and kindling them, bearing witness to 
truth and beauty. Age after age, like a living 
voice, it loves to inspire and exalt, to console 
and bless. The thing repels decay: it is as fresh 
this year as it was when first it spoke to man, 
it may be, centuries ago. 
These are the qualities, some of which at least, 
in varying degrees of excellence, but in same- 
ness of kind, must belong to all writing worthy 
of the name of fine literature. The books, re- 
views, articles, in which none of these appear, 
may be useful or amusing, but they are not lit- 

3 



erature. There are hosts of these, like the stars 
for multitude, but not for light and fire. They 
are born, twinkle for a day, and die. The book 
in which even one of them appears is verging 
towards literature. It may last a year or two, 
and then it falls into the waste-paper basket of 
the universe. Between this fleeting thing, which 
barely shares in one quality of true literature, 
and the books in which all the noble qualities of 
literature breathe and burn there is an ascend- 
ing series of writings, more and more worthy 
of the great name of literature, till we come to 
noble poetry. Except in good poetry, the com- 
bination of all these qualities is rarely found. 
Whatever we may think of other kinds of writ- 
ing, fine poetry stands at the head of literature. 
No other kind of writing is to be named along 
with it, and if I am to discuss religion in litera- 
ture in an hour's time (when the full treatment 
of such a subject would need a hundred hours), 
I will keep myself to religion as it appears dur- 
ing the last eighty years in poetry. A sketch of 
that, the outlines of which you can fill in as you 
please, may be made in an hour. 
Then as to the term religion, what I shall mean 
by that in this lecture also needs definition. It 
cannot mean in this subjectthe inward spiritual 
life which man lives with God in the depths of 
his soul. That is different in every writer of lit- 
erature, if the writer have it at all; and we are 
speaking here, under the term religion, of some- 
thing which belongs to classes of men; a ge- 
neric, not an individual thing ; a set of ideas, held 
4 



by many in common, and expressed and repre- 
sented by the poet. Nor do I take it to mean the 
congeries of doctrines and ritual adopted by any 
church or sect or generally by a nation, such as 
we mean when we speak of the Protestant or 
the Roman Catholic religion. 
I mean by it here that set of ideas, or that one 
idea, which a great writer, speaking as the 
mouthpiece of thousands of men, puts forward 
as the highest aim of life, as the expression of 
that which he desires to worship in thought and 
with passion, to which he desires to conform his 
own life, which he urges on others, and for the 
promotion of which he and all who think and 
feel with him bind themselves together into one 
body. Such a set of ideas, or such a single idea, 
is expressed in varied forms of writing, and 
breathes like a spirit through all the literature 
written by persons who have these ideas ; but it 
is expressed in the closest, the most penetra- 
tive, and the most universal way in poetry. Such 
an idea or set of ideas is not always expressed 
in poetry in a clear intellectual form, for poetry 
does not proceed by logical demonstration, but 
it is a pervasive spirit in the poetry of those who 
live by these ideas, and they steal with more 
power, creeping into the study of imagination, 
into the hearts and lives of men, than they do 
by any philosophic or argumentative treatment 
ofthem in prose. 

What, then, does the poetry of the last eighty 
years tell us about the religion or the religions 
of the land? How does religion, as defined, ap- 

5 



^ 



pear in this highest form of literature? Reli- 
gion, as defined, but sometimes religion as mere 
theology, played a great part in the new poetry 
which arose in Scotland and England about 
1780. Agood deal of the poetry of Burns was due 
to the impassioned revolt in him of the ^religion 
of nature' and of the human heart, against the 
terrible religion of Calvinism. He established 
the spirit of humanity in poetry. All the out- 
goings of love were divine, and nothing which 
was not loving could belong to God, or ought to 
belong to man. In this warm air of lovingness 
Burns wrapt the whole universe, from the low- 
est animal to the highest man, from the devil 
whom he pitied to God, who, he thought, shared 
his pity. It was a great revelation, and it has 
never, since his day, ceased to live in fine lit- 
erature. It is now part of the religion of all high 
poets, and is alive, in fire and light, in all lit- 
erature which is destined to continue and to 
grow. 

This religion in poetry was well fitted to absorb 
the main and undegraded ideas of the French 
Revolution— the freedom, equality, and frater- 
nity of man, and the return to a simple life lived 
close to nature —and it did absorb them. Words- 
worth took up this religion, worked it out, and 
made it the master spirit of his song. Full of 
the love which Burns had preached ; extending 
that love by the impassioned spirit he gained 
from France to all mankind ; citizen and lover 
not of one country but of the country of human- 
ity; he shed on the life of the peasant and the 
6 



unknown poor the light of heaven and of imag- 
ination, and made musical all the natural and 
simple life of the human heart in sorrow and joy 
by the glory and tenderness of song. And then 
he added to nature a human heart, loved it, and 
said that it loved us. And this, embodied by him, 
and varied through a hundred forms, has had 
a power on us which resembles that which the 
religion of Christ has on the heart and life of 
man. It has healed and comforted, exalted, im- 
pelled, and dignified our love of oneanother and 
our love of our country. It has penetrated the 
religion of church and sect; it has poured into 
the individual religion of thousands a spirit of 
beauty and tenderness. It has entered into the 
life of nature, and we worship God in nature 
with a new reverence and a new joy. 
Then a change took place. The enthusiasm of 
spirit, the joy in a new life of the imagination, 
which accompanied this development of pure 
literature, faded away after 1815. The increase 
of wealth, the development of the industrial rev- 
olution, the materialism of the country, the cor- 
ruption and luxury which ate into the 'upper 
classes* of society, overwhelmed the ideal Ufe 
and the simple religiousness of the poetry of 
Wordsworth; and the cynicism and self-con- 
sideration of Byron expressed only too clearly 
how little of the religion of love and joy was 
left in this country. There was a religion, but it 
was worship of self. The binding power of men 
was self-interest; the gods of the country were 
hypocrisy and Mammon and sensual pleasure; 

7 



and Byron, who, as a poet, could not altogether 
belong to this slavish crew, added to his reli- 
gion of self-worship the mockery, contempt, and 
slashing of the base gods of his people. Like 
Elijah on Carmel, he satirized the worshippers 
of Baalim, and on the whole, though his man- 
ner of doing this was bad, he stood for truth 
and honesty against lies in society, church, and 
state. To know what Britain was then, and to 
know the fury with which all high-hearted men 
regarded its spiritual condition, read the satir- 
ical poems of Byron. If he, who was himself a 
sinner, felt in that way, how did others, nobler 
of spirit, feel? 

Nevertheless, he was the voice of one crying in 
the wilderness, and the materialism of life, the 
corruption in the state, and the worthless con- 
ventionality of religion, accompanied, as it al- 
ways is, with cruel doctrines and with the image 
of a God who thinks that injustice is a form of 
love, went steadily on. Its doom had not yet 
come. But poetry was not voiceless, and by 
Shelley's lips the religion which is the master- 
hood of love was again revealed to the world. 
Love was, in his thought, the Being of the Uni- 
verse, the source, the life, the end of all things. 
All that contradicted love was doomed to per- 
ish. This was the root of Shelley's religion, and 
it is the root of all true religion; the essence of 
the true idea of God ; the thought which rules 
all the doings of God with man, to which all the 
thoughts and feelings which bind man to God 
and God to man must conform ; the foundation 
8 



of Christianity; the idea which never ceases to 
protest against the material, selfish, and sen- 
sual life; the mighty power which stands, em- 
battled, against those who worship self-inter- 
est as the master of human life— and Shelley, 
in a world which had forgotten self-forgetful- 
ness, called on it as the prophet called on the 
four winds, and bade it blow over the plains of 
our country and awake the dead. And he joined 
with this two other ideas which are its children 
—the idea of infinite forgiveness of wrong and 
the idea of the future regeneration of the hu- 
man race— both of them vital conceptions in 
the wider religion which has of late taken sub- 
stance among mankind. 
Curious that one called an atheist should do 
this— and it sheds a lurid light on the theology 
of that day that churches and sects alike com- 
bined to force one, who proclaimed, in all that 
related to man, the ideas of Jesus Christ, into 
the realm of atheism. But if priests and pres- 
byters will set up, as they did in Palestine when 
Jesus was alive, as for centuries they have done, 
in order to keep their tyranny over the souls 
and thoughts of men, a god of unforgivingness, 
a god who dooms his children to everlasting 
torture, a god who loves, for his own self-glory, 
only a few out of the millions he hates, what is a 
man to do? He must say, ' It is a hateful lie,* and 
take the consequences. Theology has changed 
since then, but England was not fit for this 
prophet, and she had sunk so low into a worldly 
life and an intolerant and lazy imitation of re- 

9 



ligion, that she drove him out of her borders in 
the name of religion. 

Look now at this island of ours in and about 
1820. No high emotion of any kind, such as lifts 
a nation above itself, pervaded it : there was no 
ideal aim before society, little care for the wel- 
fare of fellow-citizens among employers or land- 
lords, no forward hope or faith in the bettering 
of the world. A few desired higher things, but 
they were fewer even than those eight thou- 
sand who had not bowed in Israel the knee to 
Baal. There was plenty of intellectual discus- 
sion, of analysis of human nature by philoso- 
phers, but scarcely any new literature, moved 
by love of human nature, arose at this time, nor 
was there any new form of imaginative pene- 
tration into the passionate aspirations of man- 
kind. What literature of this kind existed was 
in the writings of men who, like Scott, had lived 
on from the last generation into this period. 
Criticism, also, which proved everyone wrong 
but the critic and his crew, was indeed plenti- 
ful, but there was little or no creation, and what 
there was, was thought to be a revolting birth. 
When Keats did begin to create, the critics 
howled, as if they had seen a monster. Scarcely 
anything is more amusing or more sad in liter- 
ary history than the critics' reception of Keats, 
the creator. Beauty rose before them in his po- 
etry, like Aphrodite, and the apes turned from 
her with a malicious sneer. Then Byron, sick of 
this world of critical reasoning on premises in- 
vented as truths by the philosophers and critics 
10 



themselves, sick of his own sensualities, sick of 
a materialized world, fled to Greece to die for 
liberty. Shelley was driven to Italy; his name 
and work were blackened by Edinburgh and 
London ; and the religion of the day screamed 
at the man who, alone in a loveless world, pro- 
claimed the essentials of Christianity as the 
foundation of life. 

It was no wonder that Keats, gazing on this 
world barren of passion, hope, and aspiration, 
where the bones and remnants of the noble 
ideas which had enkindled the poetic outburst 
of the end of the eighteenth century and the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth, lay dry and strewn 
on the desert, like a caravan overwhelmed by 
thirst, cried, in the sonnet which preceded the 
poems of 1817— 
* Glory and loveliness have passed away/ 

*How,' he thought, ^shall I redeem men from 
this death and misery which they think life and 
happiness? With what shall I bind them to- 
gether again? What religion shall I proclaim?* 
And he answered his question by preaching the 
religion of beauty. 

^Beauty is truth, truth beauty— that is all 
We know on earth, and all we need to know.' 

'Then how shall I make men know and feel what 
beauty is, and awake the worship of her? There 
is nothing in my country, nor in the present time, 
to stir the love of beauty in a single soul; there 
is nothing, except the beauty of the natural 
world, which moves me. Therefore I go back to 

II 



the past. I will paint the loveliness, the passion, 
the heroism of the Greek world, and of the days 
of chivalry and romance; and the forest full of 
elves; Saturn lying among the green senators 
of the woods ; Apollo singing in Delos ; Endy- 
mion embraced on Latmos ; Isabella weeping 
sore for her slain lover; Madeline flying on St. 
Agnes' Eve with Porphyro ; and all the sights 
and sounds of eternal Nature in her youth and 
loveliness.' 

And this he gave to us, but the revelation of 
beauty fell dead on the world to which he spoke. 
Keats prophesied, but no ear could hear his pro- 
phecy. Nor indeed, standing alone, unmixed 
with mighty moral aims, unaccompanied with 
the deep interests of mankind, without joining 
loveliness to its immortal fountain in the duties 
of man and in the love of God, having no vital 
roots in the present, only replanted, like cut 
flowers, from the past, could his prophecy or 
his religion of beauty kindle the world in which 
he lived, or engender new poets in that world. 
This was his own opinion. Both in his letters and 
in some of his last poems, he spoke of the ne- 
cessity of getting into inspiring touch, not only 
with the past, but with the present humanity. 
* I have not been human enough,' he thought. * I 
need another and a deeper emotion from sympa- 
thy with the living.' And had he lived, he would 
have attained his end, and won even a loftier 
seat on Parnassus than that he holds. And this 
experience of Keats' adds another proof to the 
truth that, in every age, the highest, the imperial 

12 



poetry, must find its motive and its passion in 
the existing thoughts and passions, acts and 
aspirations of the world in which the poet lives. 
Poetry about the past, poetry not vitally con- 
nected with the present human life, as the nerves 
are with the muscles, is pleasant, lovely, if a 
great poet like Keats write it, but if small poets 
write it, it becomes mere melodious words, with 
a false semblance of passion in it; and finally 
ends in thin and ghostly verse, faint and fainter, 
till it disappears. If, again, a great poet, like 
Keats, write it, his work is finally taken up into 
the whole body of song, but then it has no chil- 
dren during the poef s lifetime. Similar condi- 
tions of society may in the future produce a sim- 
ilar kind of poetry in the hands of a future mas- 
ter of song, but whenever such poetry is written 
—only about the beauty and glory of the past- 
it ends with itself. Its religion of mere beauty 
breathes and burns and charms— and dies ; and 
the ten years which followed the death of Keats 
were years in which poetry faded into mere sen- 
timentalism and melody; and literature blos- 
somed into a plenteous crop of the crab-apples 
of sour and foolish criticism. Criticism satin the 
throne of Creation, and the throne must have 
longed for its rightful lord. 
But the Master of Mankind did not let our coun- 
try continue in this state. A wind of the spirit, 
bearing with it new ideas and their native emo- 
tions, began to blow. Men in the richer classes 
grew tired of mere material comfort and of only 
living for wealth they had not earned. They 

13 



dimly longed for the ideal, and the things which 
were not to be had for money. The rage of the 
oppressed poor deepened ; the indignation of 
the middle class, who made the wealth of the 
country but had no voice in the use of it by 
Parliament, rose steadily ; till at last a cry was 
raised, full of passion and hope, and charged 
with the desire to better the conditions of gov- 
ernment and of the people, which almost gave 
birth to a violent revolution. At the same time, 
a new theological and religious movement, with 
a host of new emotions, and divided into two 
rivers of thought, stirred the hearts of men, 
and especially towards the improvement of the 
condition of the poor. The Oxford movement 
and the Liberal movement in theology were 
born at the same time as the political movement 
for reform. A tidal wave of emotion from these 
three centres flowed over the land, and out of 
it emerged a crowd of fresh ideas, fresh forms 
of action, new modes of art and new ideas about 
art, born not directly of the political and theo- 
logical stir, but of the stir itself. No contrast 
could be greater than that between this condi- 
tion of Great Britain, thrilling with ideal life and 
feeling, and the condition often years before. It 
was sure to give birth to poets, and Tennyson 
and Browning were born, as poets, in those 
years within a year of one another, and began 
to prophesy. For sixty years they worked for 
the good and progress of mankind, on different 
lines and in diverse manners. They preached 
the religious idea of freedom, of the individual 
14 



soul alone with God, of the man realizing and 
doing his duty to his fellow-man.They preached 
the religion of love, the love of God and the love 
of man, and the eternity of love in God. They 
preached, with Wordsworth, the loss of self in 
admiration of nature as the visible form of the 
beauty of God. They maintained, with Keats, 
the religion of beauty, but they added to it the 
beauty of noble conduct. They looked forward, 
with Shelley, to the new birth of man, and bid 
the world strive for it. They preached, and es- 
pecially Browning, endless aspiration after un- 
reached, even unconceived perfection, and min- 
gled with this cry of uncontent with anything 
that earth can give a stern demand to do our 
duty here on earth, within the limitations which 
earth imposes. Xive in, and for, the present,' 
they cried, ^but never be satisfied with it. Fol- 
low the ever-retreating gleam; pursue ideals 
which can only be realized in immortal life. 
We are not creatures of a day, not destined to 
death, but to endless progress.' This was the 
religion they sang, and it has profoundly influ- 
enced mankind. Browning never wavered in 
it; Tennyson, less individual than his brother, 
more sensitive to the changes of thought that 
arose and fell during those sixty years, wavered 
somewhat with those changes, and expressed 
his shifting; but at the end he settled into quiet 
faith. 

It is to the poetry which, in other hands than 
Tennyson's or Browning's, emerged during 
those changes of thought, that I now turn; 

15 



and the poets who were influenced by them 
have their own interest, and reflect their own 
world. Before 1850 had arrived, the excitement 
of the resurrection of emotional and intellectual 
life in our country, of which the political and 
theological movements were phases, had cast 
into the arena of discussion and battle a host 
of questions, from the existence of God to the 
sanitation of a village. The passion with which y 
the solution of these questions was sought was 
remarkable enough, but what was even more 
remarkable was, that while a vast number of 
books, each of which boldly claimed to have set- 
tled for ever the question to which it had ad- 
dressed itself, were written and read with eager- 
ness— there was also a general consensus that 
nothing could be settled, that man could come 
to no conclusion, that he practically knew noth- 
ing about God or himself or the world in which 
he lived, that the more he strove the blinder he 
was, and that the best thing he could do was 
to confess with humility his ignorance and his 
incapacity. Our world, long before the term 
agnostic was invented, was agnostic ; and the 
waves of that disturbance are still, with dimin- 
ished force, breaking on the shore of society. 
Nevertheless, the discussion never ceased, as 
if men still believed that they could find, by ar- 
gument, a solution of which they had no hope. 
They went round and round their subjects like 
a horse in a mill, and they ground out nothing, 
for the most part, but chaff*. They analyzed, dis- 
sected, vivisected God and humanity and na- 
16 



ture ; and in these years were born, not only the 
philosophies which ticket and put into a mu- 
seum, like fossils, all the passions, thoughts, 
and acts of men, but also the psychological 
novel, the novel of analysis, which, at first 
pleased with the dissection of health, now loves 
to dabble in disease. In the theological world 
matters were just as bad. The various parties 
lost sight of the great truths in which man be- 
lieves without proof, if he believe at all, and ar- 
gued incessantly about their views of truth ; 
and the quicker, subtler, and more analytic 
their intellectual play, the further they got from 
the great truths. Things beyond the realm of 
science, beyond phenomena, were to be settled, 
it was said, by the reasoning understanding— 
that enormous error under whose tyranny we 
are suffering so heavily. 
The result of all this activity of the understand- 
ing, employed only on the surface of things, na- 
turally unable to penetrate below the surface, 
ever arguing and never arriving, yet absurdly 
proud of its ability and earning the punishment 
of pride, was a dreadful weariness among those 
who retained any imagination, any passion for 
the unknown, any desire for beauty or the in- 
finite world, for the impalpable, the unprove- 
able ; for something to love, to lose one's self 
in, to pursue for ever and to worship. In fact, 
the soul gave in, and life became to many a 
boundless weariness. The soul had not reached 
then the state of active wrath and rebellion it 
is at present reaching against the despotism of 

17 



the understanding. It lay down helpless, tired 
out by analytic chatter; was exhausted by the 
dryness and ugliness of a world from which all 
things were excluded which could not be clearly 
judged and arranged by logical argument. And 
a great deal of that weariness still lasts, still 
waits, and sometimes whines, in society and 
literature. When it first arose in this century 
—it has made its appearance again and again 
in history— it was manlier than it is now, and 
it was expressed by two poets with courage, 
with something of a tragic dignity, and with a 
conclusion which, for the time being, was prac- 
tical, of lasting worth to the progress of man. 
Clough and Arnold were these poets, and they 
have both written some of the saddest verses 
in the world; verses steeped in a bewildered 
weariness of thought, ever inquiring and only 
touching with blind hands an impassable wall ; 
longing but unable to find either order, or love, 
or calm in the universe, but always, like some 
noble Greek caught in the net of inexorable 
fate, holding to the duties which were yet clear, 
and resolved to die unsubdued by fear, or mean- 
ness, or the world. If we wish to know what the 
age was to men of a high temper and a love of 
truth, we should read the two books published 
in 1849 by Clough and Arnold; and then read— 
observing how the bewilderment and weariness 
deepened, and how desperately men struggled 
to get to some life and light— the poems which 
Arnold published in 1853. To these poets, save 
for vague hopes, expressed now and again with 
18 



vague passion, there was no religion left but 
the religion of duty. * Do what lies before you, 
and leave the rest in other hands, if there are 
any ; and bear the dry trouble of a life which has 
lost its stars as well and bravely as you can. If 
there be a God in whom we shall live in love, if 
He cares for us, it is well ; but if not, we will act 
honourably to the end of the tragedy, and make 
the best of it.* This was the temper of the time 
in noble literature, this the religion ; and it was 
the only gospel which Carlyle and many others 
who had passed through those weary years, 
could give to us. It lasts still; it is one of the 
elements which are at the root of those merely 
ethical religions of which so many desire our 
suffrages to-day, religions which, being devoid 
of the pursuit of the perfection which reaches 
beyond duty, can never produce, in a world like 
ours, which has learnt something of the illim- 
itable and felt its passion, the spirit which cre- 
ates the noblest literature. The ethical religions 
consecrate finality. Art of every kind, like Chris- 
tianity, abhors it. 

Now, while all this weary discussion had 
brought poets to the point where Arnold and 
Clough are found — science had also been at 
work and had dispersed, in the midst of endless 
disputes, a host of the old and venerable land- 
marks of thought and belief. An example or 
two may show what it did to the ancient reli- 
gion and therefore to religion in literature. 
Geology destroyed belief in the orthodox doc- 
trine of creation, in the plenary inspiration of 

19 



the Bible, and before long in the separate cre- 
ation of man, and in the Fall as told in Gene- 
sis. Not only did that make a mighty change 
in theology; it wrought also— by blotting out 
a number of old authorities, emotional motives, 
and maps of thought— a great change in liter- 
ature. Then, Physiology, or a certain type of it, 
groping among the brain and nerves, found no 
trace, no proof of what we called the immortal 
soul. Thought, passions, imagination, worship 
—many said, were nothing more than changes 
of matter in the brain. 'See, I press my fingers, 
here in a certain place behind the ears, and the 
soul, the immortal soul, is gone.* And a heated 
argument of support and denial sprang up, 
which yet goes on, concerning a matter which 
is at the roots of religion. The ideas of God, of 
our being vitally connected with Him, of moral 
right, of a spiritual life, of immortality, were 
not given to us from without by a Being who 
loved and judged us, but evolved in the growth 
of man, by man himself. Think of all the liter- 
ary motives and emotions which perished— for 
those who believed this —in that cataclysm. 
Political economy, getting more and more sci- 
entific, and talking of laws, based on the single 
premiss that self-interest was the only guide 
of life, gave us to understand that all the Chris- 
tian ministry to the poor was merely sentimen- 
tal, of no real use. A mass of motives, hitherto 
largely used in poetry and fiction, vanished for 
all those who believed in economical laws of 
this type. Then, the microscope revealed to us 

20 



infinite worlds of the infinitely little, peopled 
by million myriads of living beings: the tele- 
scope revealed to us infinite worlds of the in- 
finitely vast; inconceivable distances, incon- 
ceivable ages, in which time and space seemed 
merely names— and between these two enor- 
mous universes were we —a mere, despicable 
speck, a mote which flickered in the infinite ; we 
who thought ourselves the centre of all things, 
the special care of the Godhead ! Then, to make 
our position still more contemptible, a scien- 
tific theory declared that everything we did 
and thought and loved was merely automatic, 
caused by things which had occurred at the 
very beginning of what was called life. Men 
drew then the conclusion that there was no 
freewill, no real sin, no real righteousness, no 
struggle for goodness: we were bound in an 
iron net. And for those who believed this, whole 
worlds of literature ceased to exist. Then came 
the doctrine of the conservation of energy, and 
then about i860 came the doctrine of Darwin ; 
and all the supernatural— miracles, creation, 
the divine essence in man and beyond man — 
went overboard in the night for those who ac- 
cepted, as explanations of the whole universe, 
these two doctrines. It was a terrible upturn- 
ing. 

Historical Criticism then took up the play, and 
it was not long before it was applied to the 
Bible, first to the Old and then inevitably to 
the New Testament. Beneath its scalpel, the 
great Protestant authority, the practical infal- 

21 



libility of our Book, was dissected away. That 
too wrought a great change on literature. It 
forced more than half of the writers of fine lit- 
erature to change their front. Tennyson, as I 
said, was much affected by these things, but he 
saved himself by his penetrating intelligence 
and spiritual imagination from thinking that 
because these things were true in physical sci- 
ence and in criticism, there was no other world 
for man than they displayed. As to Browning, 
he was quite unaffected by all this wonderful 
discovery. He disliked the whole business. *It 
has nothing to do,' he said, *with my world. 
These are questions and answers which belong 
to mere phenomena: and I do not breathe in 
that world;' and he did not change a single 
belief, nor alter a single judgment. This then 
was the state of the world, and we have not got 
out of it yet. To the weariness which came of 
incessant arguments and discussion of all in- 
tellectual subjects, was now added a state of 
mind made by the habit of not even looking 
into things incapable of demonstration ; which 
had no care for beauty, or for the forms of art 
under which beauty is represented ; which tried 
to ignore the passions ; which refused to look 
at ideals ; and which ceased to have pleasure 
in Art or Nature except as phenomena to be 
subjected to investigation. What Darwin said 
of himself— that he had lost all care for poetry 
—was true of a multitude of persons who filled 
their lives with nothing but science. They had 
lost what I mean by the soul— that part of us 

22 



which loves beauty, outreaches into the un- 
known, imagines new forms of loveliness, re- 
joices in simplicities of feeling, stirs into wor- 
ship of God, paints the restitution of all things, 
cares for feeling more than knowledge, for the 
old as much as the new, and for romance more 
than investigating. 

A great part of society took up this position 
of science with avidity, and though they tired 
of it in the end if they lived for anything beyond 
the outward, yet it has only begun quite lately 
to weary us very much indeed. The poets felt 
that weariness before we did. Between i860 
and 1870, a certain number of men were bored 
to death by this dominance in society of the 
merely scientific ideas, and flashed into rebel- 
lion against it. They did not care two straws 
whether man was descended from the ape or 
not. It was nothing to them that all forces were 
interchangeable, and that the sum of energy 
was constant. The discoveries of science were 
sometimes entertaining; matter for flying read- 
ing when they desired some relaxation from 
the press of the infinite things; sometimes ir- 
ritating. On the whole they were shadows in 
comparison with the substantial things of the 
soul. The real world of these poets was else- 
where, far beyond the realm of science. And 
when their ears were deafened with the con- 
ceited cries of science as it claimed to be the 
master-key of the universe, they determined 
(in the hope that a few might yet be able to see 
beauty and to love it) to image their own world, 

23 



and to get rid as far as they could of the dry and 
dreadful noise of argument, the money-making 
inventions, the dreary quarrels of science and 
theology, the worry of criticism, the deathful 
world of the understanding. ^ Glory and loveli- 
ness have passed away,' they cried with Keats, 
only, as it was gross materialism of life which 
produced the cry of Keats, so now it was intel- 
lectual materialism which produced the cry of 
Rossetti and of Morris. I name these two and 
not Swinburne, whose position towards his 
time is much more difficult to define. But these 
two, at a time analogous in many ways to the 
time of Keats, did the very thing which Keats 
did. They left behind them, as if they did not 
exist, the worlds of theology and politics and 
business and science, all of them engaged in 
getting on ; and fled back, as Keats fled, to find 
the beauty and romance and emotion they 
could not find in the present in the stories 
of the Greeks, and the Arthurian times, and 
the mediaeval romance, and the Norse sagas. 
There they found what they loved and wor- 
shipped—beauty and heroism, simplicity and 
passion, and a lovely world, undefiled by inven- 
tion, undisturbed by intellectual analysis, un- 
dissected by science. *To love beauty, that is 
our religion.' It was the cry of Keats, and, like 
the cry in the mouth of Keats, it marks the 
exhaustion of the poetic impulse of 1832. It 
marks the replacing of a poetry which once 
had vitally to do with the present by a poetry 
which despised and loathed the present; and 
24 



as such, it was only a literary poetry, as was the 
poetry of Keats. 

Well, I repeat, that, delightful as that poetry 
is when written by men like Morris, Rossetti, 
or Keats, and capable of giving a lasting plea- 
sure to the human race, it does not create a 
school, it does not make creative emotion in a 
whole people. It is a pleasant backwater, in the 
full stream of a nation's poetry. Lovely islands, 
full of trees, fountains of flowers, are formed in 
it, where men may rest for a time and be happy. 
But its waters circle round and round upon 
themselves. They do not flow on, and become a 
river, or join the main river of song. And in the 
end they dry up. The religion of beauty, which 
seeks for its objects of worship only in the past 
and in a reversion to past loveliness, does not, 
when mingled with a contempt of the present, 
create a reproductive literature— a literature 
with children and grandchildren. It records only 
a certain mood in a limited society. When we 
are in that mood we read it with pleasure, but 
it is no foundation for life. Morris called him- 
self *the idle singer of an empty day.' It did not 
satisfy himself. He felt the call of the present on 
him. The injustice of things awoke his indig- 
nation, the sorrow of the world kindled his pity, 
and he began to live passionately in the pres- 
ent. He became a warlike socialist. But he did 
not lose his religious idea, 'that in the devotion 
to beauty was the salvation of society.' But now 
he changed its place and time. He did not bid 
us look back to find it. He applied it to present 

25 



life and bid us carry it with us into the future. 
'I will develop/ he thought, *the love of beauty 
in all things in men ; and the proper means for 
that is to induce men to make things out of 
their own intelligence and for their own use, 
and out of their own desire for pleasurable emo- 
tion in what they do. Therefore, mere machine 
work, which must necessarily be unintelligent, 
must be, except for preparatory purposes, put 
aside. In their own handiwork men rejoice and 
love. Therefore, also, men must cease to copy 
the fine work of the past, for all copying is done 
without love of the work or joy in it. What we 
have to do to save the world is to lead men to ex- 
press their own ideas, no matter how roughly, 
in handiwork ; to get them to create, moved by 
the impulses of their own time and their own 
soul ; to create in any vehicle whatever. This 
will so develop their imagination, their soul, 
and so fill their lives with the greatest joy in the 
world, the joy of making something out of their 
own being, that, in the end, they will begin, 
because they love and rejoice in their work, to 
add beauty to what they do, and finally to make 
nothing which will not be beautiful. Then the 
base, ugly, mean elements of life will disappear. 
Buildings, clothing, towns, books, all the do- 
ings and means of life, will give joy to the soul, 
minister to imagination, awaken aspiration, 
satisfy and charm the heart. Humanity will 
feel itself content and divine. Nature will give 
all her impulses to man, and man will love her 
better than before. Her beauty will be cared for, 
26 



and the care will react on the inner sense of 
beauty, and develop it further.' 
This it was which Morris conceived as the 
means of saving society, when he found out that 
to picture the lovely and heroic life of the past 
was not— as Keats also discovered— enough to 
kindle society into a new life, or to supply the 
imagination with sufficient food on which to 
nourish a new literature. 
This idea of his is a real contribution to the 
religion of humanity, to social religion. It has 
no force as yet, nor is it possible as yet to real- 
ize it over any large surface of society. Great 
changes will have to take place in the social 
state before what is really vital and useful in 
this idea can take form. But some day it will 
be one of the master thoughts of a religion for 
life— not, as Morris seemed to think, the only 
master thought. By itself, the love of beauty 
and the making of it cannot fulfil the religious 
wants of man, not even in the practical or pos- 
sible form in which Morris finally put it. But 
it will have to become a part of the religious 
idea and of religious practice. We have too 
much forgotten that if God be love. He must 
also be beauty. Indeed, if the capability of con- 
ceiving the infinite of righteousness in an in- 
finite Being is that which plainly differenti- 
ates us from the brute, the capability of loving 
beauty, and the desire to make it, as plainly, 
perhaps even more plainly, differentiate us from 
the brute. In all other points— in intellect, in 
conscience, in self-consciousness, in emotions, 

27 



and the passions— we can find points of con- 
tact, similarities, with the lower animals, but 
in the matters which range themselves under 
the terms * Christianity* and 'Art' there is no 
resemblance whatsoever, no descent. The love 
of love and the love of beauty are one — two 
sides of the same shield — and the high form of 
the future religion for man to which we look 
forward will have to include the latter as well 
as the former. We shall have to worship God, 
not only as the Father who loves us all, but as 
the King in his beauty. Morris has started the 
conception which will lead us to that, though 
he did not connect it with a god at all ; and when 
we mingle it up with the worship of God the 
Father as the source of beauty because He is 
the source of love, we shall complete the idea 
he left incomplete. Incomplete, however, as he 
left it, it is becoming more and more a power 
in all fine literature. It is not an idea which 
ends : it is a living idea which grows, and it will 
be interesting to watch its development in the 
new century as a means to a higher religion 
and a higher society. At present it cannot find 
itself, and it rarely appears even in poetry. 
Morris himself did not put it into poetry, only 
into romances. 

Well, we are left, so far as poetic literature is 
concerned, as we were after the days of Keats, 
in a world almost destitute of leading ideas, 
of ideas which have growth in them. Poetry 
has no captains who give it a steady direc- 
tion. No master ideas, such as Tennyson and 
28 



Browning had, urge its course towards a clear 
end, or fill its sails with a steadfast wind. Nor 
does it represent, as Arnold and Clough did, 
or as Morris and Rossetti and Swinburne did 
after them, the main conditions of the age in 
which we are living. It only represents (with 
the exception of the work of a few men who 
are scarcely read) the helpless wavering of a 
class in society which has no clear ideas as to 
what it ought to do with its life, and none with 
regard to its future. It takes up now one sub- 
ject and now another, and drops them without 
finishing them. It tries sensuality, and rebel- 
lion, and mysticism, and supernaturalism, and 
imperialism, and spiritual religion, and nature- 
poetry, and hospitals, and crude coarseness, 
and crime, and sentimental love, and pessi- 
mism, and it composes hosts of little lyrics 
about nothing. Everything by turns, and noth- 
ing long. It amuses itself with difficult metres, 
and surprising rhymes, and elaborated phras- 
ing, and painting in words, and scientific tricks 
of versing. It has no great matter, no fine think- 
ing, and no profound passion, and it is the re- 
verse of simple. And the world is becoming 
tired of it, and longs for the advent of youth, 
originality, joy, hope, and the resurrection of 
vital ideas, in poetry. Along with this, and al- 
ways accompanying this prolific littleness, is 
a terrible recrudescence of criticism. Every 
magazine, all the daily papers, every publish- 
ing house, is filled with essays and articles and 
books about poetry, carping, or denouncing, 

29 



or satirizing, or praising without knowledge, 
and in astonishing excess. I cannot tell how 
often I have lately seen in the papers and in 
books that a poet, if not superior, then equal to 
Shakespeare, has appeared on the stage. And 
all this overwhelming shower-bath of criticism 
has chilled the world, which wants, nay, hun- 
gers, for some warm and living creation. More- 
over, we are still, like Arnold, wearied by end- 
less discussions, by the shouting of people who 
want nothing said which cannot be proved, 
who replace sentiment by materialism, who 
will not allow us to love nature except in ac- 
cordance with science, who, pinning us down 
to this world only, forbid us to overclimb the 
flaming walls and go wandering, like gypsies, 
into the infinites of love and beauty, because 
we cannot be as certain of such infinities as 
we are certain that two and two make four. 
Were these folk to succeed in infecting the 
whole world with their theories— fine litera- 
ture would die of disgust, and poetry be drained 
of its life-blood. 

The first thing we want for the sake of a great 
literature and a great poetry is a noble religion 
which will bear, by its immaterial truths, our 
intellect, conscience, emotions, imagination, 
and spirit beyond this world ; and yet, by those 
very truths, set us into the keenest activity in 
the world for the bettering of the world ; mak- 
ing every work, and, above all, literature, full 
of a spiritual and a social passion, weighty and 
dignified by spiritual and social thought. Such 
30 



a religion must not contradict any established 
scientific or historic truth ; it must be capable 
of easily entering into all the honest business 
of the world as a spirit of life and love; it must 
be freed from every shred of exclusiveness, so 
that not one of its doctrines or its rites should 
shut out any man whatever from union with 
God; its ideas must be as universal as God 
Himself, and their application to men as uni- 
versal; it must claim man as akin to God in a 
relationship which never can be broken, and 
is eternal ; and it will say to itself, in our hearts, 
*God has not given to me the spirit of fear, but 
of power and of love and of a sound mind.' Such 
a religion is contained in a few large ideas. Uni- 
versal fatherhood, universal childhood, there- 
fore universal brotherhood. God, thus akin to 
us, our nearest relation, cannot leave us to evil 
or death. All sin is, therefore, finally, if slowly, 
rooted out of us, and we are made at one with 
Him in eternal life. This is universal forgive- 
ness. 

Then, too, immortal love destroys all death in 
us. Our personality is secured for ever. This is 
universal immortality. 

Our life on earth is made up of two duties, 
our duty to live in harmony with the character 
of our Father, our duty to love and live for our 
brothers. 

But beyond these duties ranges the infinite 
love and righteousness of God. And the last 
and highest idea of religion in life is the strug- 
gle towards infinite perfection. 

31 



What we want, secondly, along with such a 
religion, for the sake of a noble literature, and 
especially for the sake of a lasting school of 
poetry, is a great social conception, carrying 
with it strong and enduring emotions, appeal- 
ing to the universal heart of man and woman — 
a great social conception of the duties of man- 
kind, of the true aim, end, and foundation of 
human life ; of the future of mankind in a re- 
generated civilization, with all the hopes and 
aspirations of this conception like the winds of 
spring in our hearts ; and lastly a clear idea of 
how man's happiness is to be established. The 
basis of such a conception is the Brotherhood 
of Man, and that is made religious when it is 
founded on belief in the Fatherhood of God. 
Such a conception is now struggling into light, 
labouring by a thousand experiments into its 
practical and ideal form. We call it by many 
names, and everyone knows in how many and 
diverse, even contradictory, shapes it appears. 
Nevertheless, there are a few common thoughts 
and feelings underneath its varying sects, and 
these are growing firmer and securer day by 
day. Steady thought, well-founded feeling, col- 
lect around them ; and in time the right, noble, 
lucid shape of the conception will be found. 
Some day the mastering form which will at- 
tract all men, will emerge, as it were of itself, 
and leap forth all-victorious in wisdom, like 
Athena from the head of Zeus. 
That will impassionate the world. The civiliza- 
tion based on self-interest will go down before 
32 



it. That civilization is really barbarism. The 
root of that higher civilization will be self-for- 
getfulness in love, and that is Christ's religion. 
When these two come together, when such a 
social idea is married to a universal religion, of 
which unlimited Love is lord and king, we shall 
have the greatest of literatures. Its full reali- 
zation may be far off. But, even at the present 
time, it is nearer than when we first believed. 
One form of that socialist conception, after 
centuries of travail, was born at the end of 
last century, and its emotions created a new 
poetry in our land. Another form of it arose in 
1832, and its emotions created again a new poe- 
try. And we are now on the verge of a new and 
passionate form of it, to be bound up, I trust, 
with a universal religion. I hope to see it before 
I die, and then this great country, borne into 
higher realms of thought and feeling than it 
can conceive at present, will create out its fresh 
excitement an original literature and a poetry, 
as great, it may even be greater, than any it 
has yet produced. 



[1900] 



33 



II. RELIGION IN LIFE 




II. RELIGION IN LIFE 

HE term 'Religion* 
has many meanings, 
but as used in the title 
of this discourse, it is 
taken to mean the out- 
ward form which we 
give in daily life to the 
inward spiritual life,— 
to thebeliefs, thoughts, 
feelings, and hopes of 
our silent communion 
with God. 

But there are a thousand different kinds of 
daily life and work. In which of these kinds is 
religion to be described, for its form will differ 
in each, and in each its duties will be distinc- 
tive? And it is in clearly marking out the sepa- 
rate duties, temptations and aims, and the sep- 
arate ideals of each kind of life when conceived 
as the worship of God in the service of man, that 
the practical use of such discourses as this is 
contained. The religion of a citizen, religion in 
national life, religion in a business life, religion 
in the life of an artist, a politician, a physician, 
a mechanic, would, all of them, be good sub- 
jects and well fitted for an hour's discourse. 
But a subject of this kind needs a book. It is 
too vague and large for a lecture. It is like 
saying to a scientific man, ' Lecture, in an hour, 
on "Energy in the Universe."* However, it may 
be possible to seclude some definite, some root 
ideas on this matter. 

37 



The first thing to be said is that whatever reli- 
gious faith, feelings, and hopes we have, we are 
bound to shape them into form in life, not only 
at home, but in the work we do in the world. 
Whatever we feel justly, we ought to shape; 
whatever we think, to give it clear form ; what- 
ever we have inside of us, our duty is to mould 
it outside of ourselves into clear speech or act, 
which, if it be loving, will be luminous. 'If ye 
know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.' 
The true successes of life are contained in that 
principle. It is a first law. It is, for example, 
the beginning, middle, and end of education. 
The knowledge poured into the young nowa- 
days is worth little or nothing unless we also 
make them gain the habit first of shaping it 
clearly in their mind, and then of putting it into 
form in word or act outside of their mind. They 
must not only receive, they must make. A sin- 
gle lesson given to a child which he is able tore- 
produce, with a fresh individual touch in it, is 
better than a hundred lessons which are left to 
lie formless in his mind. When he shapes the 
knowledge, however crudely, in his own way, 
so as to say 'There it is, I see what I thought,* 
the child or the man possesses something he 
can use. Moreover, he has gained one step 
towards activity of mind, and another step to- 
wards an artistic, that is a formative, habit of 
mind ; and another step, most important per- 
haps of all, towards that moral power which 
derives from striving to a known end, and that 
moral joy which follows on the consciousness 
38 



that we are daily nearer to the end at which 
we aim. The secret of education and of self- 
education is to learn to embody our thoughts 
in words, luminously ; to realize our knowledge 
in experiment; to shape our feelings into ac- 
tion ; to represent without us all we are within ; 
and to do this steadily all our life long. 
It is the secret also of 'religion in life.' As God 
shapes His love in the universe, as the Master 
of Love lived His love into action and speech, 
so our religion is to be done, not dreamed ; lived, 
not contemplated. We must bring it into the 
open air, let it go in and out among men, test it 
in daily life, shape it in our manners, our voice, 
our decisions, in all our doings. Every effort 
thus made, and not given up till the shaping 
is completed, is at once education and aspira- 
tion. For the shaping of one religious act is the 
impulse to, and the foundation of, another and 
higher act. But if we keep our religious faiths, 
feelings, and hopes within, unshaped in life, 
we shall never realize them ; least of all in those 
days of trial or temptation when we need them 
most; and, in the end, they will die of starva- 
tion. The proper food of all inward religion is 
the forms we give it outwardly. 
One of the misfortunes of modern life is the 
habit, which has grown so much of late years, 
of keeping our thoughts and feelings within 
us ; vaguely building and unbuilding them in 
our soul, like clouds; feeding on dreams, and 
vain of our dreaming. When Carlyle bid us be 
silent, he did not mean this kind of silence, 

39 



and he did not himself keep it. He thought 
and felt a great deal about himself and the 
world about him, but he got rid of it by shap- 
ing it in anything but silence, and then went 
on to new matter. In that way he never stag- 
nated as other hopeless persons do. He moved 
on always, impelled men in new fashions, star- 
tled the world into new activities ; and did this 
excellent work by continually violating the si- 
lence he was so fond of preaching. Sad as his 
life was, it had at least, in this incessancy of 
shaping, the joy of creation— an iron joy to 
him— but it kept him alive to a great old age, 
and it gave life to a dull world. But when we 
plume ourselves on being silent souls, with 
thoughts too fine for * common' men, and feel- 
ings too delicate to expose to the rough tests 
of the world, what use are we? What beauty, 
truth, or religion, can we put into the daily life 
of man; what personal joy can we have in liv- 
ing? 

Many complain that there is 'little enthusiasm 
left in society, little freshness or youthful ar- 
dour. Worldliness has taken these away.' 
True, it has done something of that work. But 
the worst part of that work has been done by 
the multitude of people, who will take no trou- 
ble to get their soul into some outward shape, 
and who spend their days in wondering if they 
will ever be appreciated, and never doing any- 
thing whereby they may be appreciated. Of 
course, they have no enthusiasm, no ardour. 
It is only through making something outside 
40 



of ourselves, or setting some movement into 
order in the world, with the purpose of help- 
ing our fellow-men and giving them some joy, 
that enthusiasm stirs in us or others. Ardour 
is only born when there is an act of shaping. 
There is the shaping of religious life at home, 
in business, in society ; and this consists chiefly 
in acts of loving kindness, help and sacrifice ; 
in good manners, chivalry, pity, tenderness, 
thoughtfulness, in a thousand gracious and 
gentle acts. Other shaping is in speech, writ- 
ing, public action, in the producing of art, sci- 
ence, literature, business and labour. It takes 
its rise in thought. ^Keep the idea to yourself 
—the world says, and your own fears support 
the world's saying. No, get it into form. A great 
deal of the shaping would be inadequate, even 
bad. That would be inevitable. But I do not ad- 
vocate any attempt to throw at once into the 
arena of the world everything we think and 
feel. On the contrary, shape it first in quiet 
thought within, shape it in solitude and silence 
into writing; get it into clearness for yourself, 
and then put it forth to the world. But never 
let it remain as a vague and undefined dream 
within you ; and when you have got it clear, do 
not then keep it, laid up like the talent in the 
napkin. Put it to the test. Let the full sunlight 
shine upon it. Indeed, the moment we have got 
the thing clear, and care for it, it will itself, like 
an actual person, hunger and thirst for out- 
ward form, desiring to realize itself, so that we, 
sympathizing with its ardour, cannot rest till 

41 



we have given it means to be alive and active 
in the world of men. Whether we shall fail, or 
be ridiculed, does not, in the happy heat of the 
moment, occur to us at all. For the thing we 
make, the work itself, is our joy, and not what 
the world says about it; no, not even what we 
ourselves may think about it. We are out of 
ourselves, having lost — and a joyful and blessed 
loss it is— self-consideration ; and being out of 
ourselves, in the rejoicing world of self-forget- 
fulness, we do not care a straw for the criti- 
cism of the world, nor can we be worried by 
self-criticism. 

Nor, indeed, is it likely, if we outshape our- 
selves in this clear fashion, that the world will 
be hard on us. On the contrary, it will be grate- 
ful. The one thing mankind most desires is ac- 
tion of some kind, something made, something 
which has movement and life in it; and the 
more we give men that, and the more varied 
is what we give, the more their satisfaction 
and pleasure. The more you shape, the more 
you will rightly please yourself and the more 
you will please, also in the right way, the great 
brotherhood. For a number of men and women 
are dull and weary. Put some action on their 
stage, some new thing into form before them. 
Let them feel life moving before their eyes. 
Give, and lose yourself in what you give. Vivify 
the great drama by creating new scenes, em- 
bodying fresh thoughts, and the world will be 
charmed, helped, comprehensive, and grateful. 
Make, for instance, one act of love, and you will 
42 



do more good to men and teach them more 
of the religion of self-forgetfulness than by a 
thousand years of lonely thought. We are born 
to communicate ourselves to our fellow pil- 
grims, and when we do it lovingly we fulfil 
the half of religion. Above all, let there be no 
delay in beginning ; no more dreaming. Life 
runs swiftly, and it may be over before we 
have done anything for our companions. If we 
lose to-day, it is likely to be the same story 
to-morrow; and days are lost lamenting over 
lost days. 

*Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; 
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it! 
Boldness has genius, power, magic in it! 
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated ; 
Begin it, and the work will be completed.* 

As to failure, the less we think of it, the better. 
In thinking of it and in fear of it, men lose 
the power of action, are afraid to shape their 
thoughts, and if they do shape them tenta- 
tively, have little joy in their work. Their ar- 
dour has worn away in fear. 
Our work does often seem to fail ; and the world 
cries out, * He is defeated ; he saved others, him- 
self he cannot save.' Yet the words in which 
the crowd proclaimed the failure of Jesus were 
in reality the proclamation of his true success. 
His desire was to save others, not to save him- 
self. When the priests went home from Calvary 
they said, *That deceiver is finished with.' But 
Jesus, who lost himself in his work, and who 

43 



had shaped it by death into its last and divin- 
est form, never for one moment thought that he 
had failed. *I have finished the work thou gav- 
est me to do.* ^ Consummatum est/ he cried, and 
the cry was that of sacred triumph. 
Moreover, if we do fail, and rightly fail; if our 
heart and instinct of intellect tell us that the 
web was ill-woven and the pattern ill-chosen, 
I do not see that we have any right to complain, 
but quite the contrary. For the failure tells us 
that what we have been doing does not fit in 
with the course of the universe ; and an excel- 
lent piece of education is that knowledge. It 
should not set us wailing, but inspire us to find 
out what does fit in with the universe. After a 
time we discover that thing ; and then a curious, 
pleasant truth dawns upon us. It is that the 
work is not only done by us, but does itself in 
a wonderful way. If the thing we have set go- 
ing is in accord with the movement of the phy- 
sical, or intellectual, or moral, or, in the case 
of religion in Ufe, with the spiritual order of the 
universe, it grows, independently of our efforts, 
by its own vitality. We tend it, water it, prune 
it day by day, clear its way to the light, fix our- 
selves upon it, pour into it all our character, 
body, and spirit, and yet we are conscious that 
our power is not sufficient to bring it to its ful- 
ness. Suddenly, to our surprise and joy, the 
thing breaks into blossom, flowers and bears 
fruit, develops beyond our expectation, flings 
its seeds hither and thither, and, instead of one 
plant, there are twenty. 
44 



What has happened? Why, the work, the thing- 
we have created, being in harmony with the 
life of all things, has grown of itself; or, as I 
should put it, God, who is this universal life, 
finding the work we have made in accord with 
His, has entered into this work of ours, and 
now His power is in our power, and His crea- 
tive force in our creation. And we, rejoicing, 
and losing every shred of vanity because we 
see God, say to ourselves, with all the surprise 
of Jacob, * Surely God was in this work of mine 
and I knew it not.' That conviction, felt through 
every kind of noble work, imaginative, moral, 
intellectual, or spiritual, would be to have reli- 
gion in life. And, indeed, what vaster end can 
any human life possess than that the work 
which is the outward form of our inward 
thought and emotion should become part of us, 
part of mankind, part of the universe, part of 
the will of the righteous Master of all work? 
Therefore, if we want to get religion into life, 
or anything whatever in us into life, we are 
bound to have no contentment, no rest, no 
dreaming, no delays, till we get thought into 
shape, feeling into labour, some conviction, 
some belief, some idea, into form, without us, 
among the world of men. This is the main prin- 
ciple, and it applies to every sphere of human 
effort —to the pursuit of science, art, literature, 
business, policy, law, professions, manual la- 
bour, social reform, and religion. So much for 
the habit whereby we gain power to bring re- 
ligion into daily life. Now what is the religion 

45 



we bring-, and how shall we live it in the world? 
Religion is, first, to have within us the love 
of God because we believe Him to be perfect 
Love, and to love in God all that comes from 
Him— humanity, nature, and the life of both; 
and the best definition of this love is self-for- 
getfulness. That was Christ^s religion, and he 
lived it. And it is, secondly, to have righteous- 
ness within ; and to believe in a God who is the 
essence and source of Right, and therefore to 
think rightly, to feel rightly, to act rightly ; and 
to exercise all the faculties of the soul in ac- 
cord with the righteousness of the divine Be- 
ing who makes Himself personal to us as a 
Father. That, too, was Christ's religion; and 
in this love and this righteousness he lived out 
his life among men. That is our subject here 
—not the inward religion of the spirit alone 
with its Father, that hidden sacred life; but 
what forms love and righteousness take in hu- 
man life. 

Righteousness, shaped from within to without 
in the world of men, is justice, and the doing 
of justice. This is the first need of common- 
wealths, the first duty of the individual citizen, 
and the practical religion of both. I do not, of 
course, mean mere legal justice, which may, 
only too often, be organized injustice ; but such 
action as answers to the demand made in our 
soul when, without considering our self-inter- 
est, we stand face to face with our highest con- 
ception of divine justice. To harmonize, at all 
risks, our political, civic, professional, business 
46 



and labouring life with that, is to bring religion 
into life. There is enough still left of injustice 
in the whole body of society to make that effort 
a tremendous call on every hour of the day. It 
is not justice, for example, in a State that an 
overwhelming number of its members should 
not have equal opportunities of possessing and 
using the absolute necessities of human life— 
water, light, air, decent dwellings, proper dis- 
tribution of wholesome food— and enough lei- 
sure to enable them to educate into health 
their body, their intellect, their soul, their con- 
science (personal and civic), and their spirit. 
To work to get this injustice undone is to have 
religion in life. I have often walked from the 
slums of Lambeth to the fine houses of Bel- 
gravia, and asked myself, not for any absurd 
equalization of wealth, but why those poor folk 
should not have, as well as the others, enough 
of the common needs of human life for a decent 
life— enough water to wash with, enough air 
to breathe, enough light to enjoy and labour 
by, enough of decent housing. That justice lies 
in the hands of Parliament, municipalities and 
those who vote for their members. Till it is 
done injustice rules. I think society, until it is 
done, is affected with insanity, in every sense 
of the word. The 'common sense' which now 
delays or refuses to do it is common folly. I 
have seen lately many of the manufacturing 
towns, and visited the streets where they nurse 
up their criminals and their diseased classes 
in darkness and stench and rotten buildings, 

47 



and cram them by sixes in rooms scarcely able 
to hold one person decently, in courts where 
fresh air is only tasted in a heavy gale,— and 
I have wondered at the folly of men and mu- 
nicipalities. Is this civic justice? 
We have but to look round us, wherever we 
live, to find plenty of civic injustice; and the 
root of it is self-interest. Take another exam- 
ple which affects both England and Scotland. 
It is a grave injustice to the whole country 
that a great part of it should be ruined by 
smoke when the evil is remediable by no great 
expenditure of money, an expenditure which 
should be partly borne by the whole country 
and partly by the manufacturers. For the whole 
country suffers from keeping hell in the midst 
of it and by the misery, ill-health, and ruined 
constitutions of the future fathers and mothers 
of the manufacturing community. I do not 
speak of the destruction of all beauty, and the 
worse destruction of the sentiment of beauty 
in the soul and of the possibility of knowing 
what it is— but that is not one of the least of 
the evils of this curse. And the manufacturers 
themselves, who blast a whole neighbourhood, 
defile its waters, and rob the people of beauty, 
light, air and loveliness, are unjust to their 
countrymen, and will in the end suffer the na- 
tural punishment of their injustice, that is, 
they will become more unjust. I cannot blame 
them too severely, because they are supported 
by an overwhelming social opinion at present; 
and they do not think of or know clearly what 

48 



they are doing-. But to be thus thoughtless 
and thus ignorant is to be gravely in the wrong. 
They, and all those who in any business are 
thus thoughtless or selfish, have as yet no ad- 
equate conception of their duties as citizens, 
nor of civic religion in daily life. That is enough 
to illustrate what I mean. I need not dwell on 
other injustices — the poisonous trades of the 
country, the sending- to sea of rotten ships, 
the want of sufficient secondary education, the 
dreadful need of leisure for the poor worker 
who is only able to keep daily starvation at 
bay, the wringing in many cases of the last 
drop of the blood of labour from men, and the 
casting- of them at the end of sixty years of un- 
relieved toil, like carted rubbish, into the work- 
house, while there are thousands who do no 
work at all. These are only examples of the 
many gross injustices which traverse our so- 
ciety, and which, if we care one pin for reli- 
gion in life, for shaping inward into outward 
righteousness, we are bound to war against, 
and, having slain them, to replace them by just 
things. And there is not one of us who, in our 
profession, business, and labour, may not do a 
part of that work of bringing the justice of God 
into our social system. At the very least, we may 
ourselves be just in every relation of life, do 
nothing and say nothing to our fellow-men 
which we should be ashamed of before that tri- 
bunal of high honour which mankind, in the 
end, will establish, and which will give its sol- 
emn judgment on our lives. That would be re- 

49 



ligion in life, and there is nothing in the whole 
world at present of so grave and awful a ne- 
cessity as the doing of civic justice. 
So much for justice as the form of inward right- 
eousness—that is, as righteousness in life. A 
still higher form into which we may put our 
religion in life is in doing the things which be- 
long to love ; and I say love is the higher form, 
because it secures justice. If we truly love our 
fellows, we are sure to do them justice. If, for 
example, the manufacturers at the potteries 
cared for their men and women at all, do you 
think they would poison them with lead in or- 
der to avoid some expense and a little trouble? 
If the landlords who leave the dwellings of the 
labourers on their estate in the shameless con- 
dition of which we have so lately heard, or drive 
off their estate, by pulling down dwellings, the 
poor, whose only refuge then is death in the 
slums of a big town —if they cared for men or 
women at all, do you think they would do that 
iniquity? No ; if there is pity and love in a man, 
he does justice to his fellow-men. Love, then, 
rules justice. It is the greatest; its work is the 
highest form into which we may shape our re- 
ligion in life. 

Now, in what way can this be put most prac- 
tically? What is the love of God in life? It is 
to love the whole of God's character in all we 
do, not only at home, where a man is worse 
than a brute if he does not do what is loving, 
but abroad, in his profession, trade, business, 
and labour. It is there that we should take the 
50 



I3th chapter of ist Corinthians as our rule of 
life ; read it every morning that we may remem- 
ber it during the day, and every night that we 
may ask ourselves whether we have done it an 
injury. I wonder how many of us, when the day 
is over and we return from our business to our 
home, could think, without some self-reproach, 
of these words, *Love doth not behave itself 
unseemly; seeketh not her own; is not easily 
provoked ; thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in in- 
justice, but rejoiceth in the truth'? and yet, on 
the effort to fulfil something of that in all our 
lives, the future relations of capital and labour 
depend, and the continued greatness, peace 
and joy of this country. 

But God's character is made not only of love 
and righteousness, but also of other qualities, 
contained implicitly indeed in righteousness 
and love, but which we separate for the sake 
of clear thinking. He is made of truth and pity, 
long-suffering and forgivingness,joy and peace. 
These are the things we should shape into life 
because we love them. To be faithful always 
to that which we believe to be true ; to be faith- 
ful to our principles and our conscience when 
trial comes, or when we are tempted to sacri- 
fice them for place or pelf; to be faithful to our 
given word ; to keep our promises to men when 
we might win favour by eluding or breaking 
them ; to cling to intellectual as well as to moral 
truth, even when our whole position depends 
on our judgment; to so live among men that 
they may always know where we are; to fly our 

51 



flag in the storm as well as in the calm— that 
is to live religion, to live God's truth, into life. 
Again, to support, in a world which has grown 
hard-hearted, the cause of pity; not to be led 
away by the blind folk who ridicule the outgo- 
ings of pity as sentimentality — who are igno- 
rant that the loss of pity is a return to savagery, 
without the excuse of savagery — not to allow 
the pursuit of knowledge to deprive you of pity 
for any suffering whatever, for every violation 
of pity does more vital harm to a nation and 
humanity than any increase of knowledge can 
do good ; to take care that the rubs of life do 
not harden the heart ; to keep pity and mercy 
for those who injure you, and also for those 
who injure the nation by crime — men who, in- 
deed, must be prevented from doing more mis- 
chief, but prevented remedially, not penally — 
that is to love the character of God, to bring 
the religion of God's pity into life. 
To be long-suffering with the wrong-doer; to 
give him chance after chance, never wearied 
by wrong-doing into impatience; to forgive 
wrong done to ourselves in public and in pri- 
vate affairs with frankness, even with a kind 
of joy; to go on forgiving and forgiving with 
unwearied hope. Until seven times? said S. 
Peter— nay, said Christ, until seventy times 
seven, that is, with no limit to forgiveness. Thus 
to do as our Father does, who is kind to the 
unthankful and the evil, and whose forgiveness 
is not limited, as certain theologians dare to 
say in the teeth of the life of Christ —that is to 
52 



bring religion into daily life because we love 
the character of God, 

To spread around us joy and happiness and 
peace ; to fill a depressed or exhausted world 
with the spirit of joy; to make a summer for 
men in the midst of winter; to uplift the hearts 
of men in this troubled world ; to be a fountain 
of life, strength, and joy, in the midst of folk 
who glorify decay; to so live as to bring and 
publish peace, that glad tidings in the midst of 
the angers, quarrels, and foolish strife by which 
we are encompassed ; to make peace, and pour 
it from our lives like rain on a thirsty land — 
that, too, is to bring the character of God into 
life, to make religion vital in the world. 
It is thus we may shape love by living of God's 
character out among men. In what other way 
can we shape love? We can shape it into love 
of our country. To love one's country is to love 
its ancient virtues, and hate its ancient wrongs ; 
to mark them out clearly one from another, and 
live the one and slay the other. It is to pass by 
with contempt the dark cavern where men 
worship Mammon ; to hold ourselves free from 
impure living; to seek a simple, quiet, unluxu- 
rious, but fair life; to rejoice in distributing, 
not in hoarding or wasting wealth ; to fix our 
thought and effort on the attainment of right- 
eousness in public life and private homes; to 
sacrifice personal objects to great public aims; 
to have the courage to attempt what seems im- 
possible through love of the ideals of truth and 
beauty, and to prefer to die on the field of work 

53 



and self-devotion rather than to live in idleness 
and luxury. 

Moreover, to love one's country, and to shape 
that part of our religion into life, is to fight 
against the false theory that the principle of a 
nation's life is self-interest — when it is self-de- 
votion ; and to wage this sacred war in the city 
and in the country, in our business, on the mu- 
nicipality, as voters and citizens, in our profes- 
sions, and in our place in Parliament. It is to 
work for a national condition which will enable 
all men to have an equal chance of self-devel- 
opment, and minister to the education of all in 
the things which are true in knowledge, beau- 
tiful in art and nature, sound and sane in intel- 
ligence, clear in conscience, ideal in the spirit; 
which in daily life increase gentleness and cour- 
tesy, loving-kindness, pity, grace, and good 
manners. It is above all to educate in every class 
of citizens that spirit of self-sacrifice, which, 
accepting in the name of God and duty the bur- 
dens, diseases and distresses of the body poli- 
tic, is never satisfied till it has put an end to 
them. That, and much more, is to love one's 
country, and to bring love of it, as a part of re- 
ligion, into life. 

But the shaping of love into life makes a fur- 
ther demand upon us. It is to love mankind. 
Indeed, the best way to love one's country is to 
love mankind. The patriotism of humanity, if 
I may use that phrase, contains the patriotism 
we give to our country. The higher and wider 
embraces the lower and the more limited, as 
54 



our love of God contains our love of man. Nor 
is the lower lost in the higher. On the contrary, 
it is defended by the higher love from its defects 
and excesses, and its essential differences are 
developed towards their perfection. 
Some say that the phrase, 'the love of mankind,' 
is vague. But I can define it so that what it is, 
and how to exercise it, shall be clear. 
To love mankind is to love all the ideas on 
which the progress of the race depends, and to 
live one's life in their behalf; to devote one's be- 
ing to them ; and to offer on their altar all we 
are. That is the doctrine of Jesus, and that was 
his practice. He lived, he died, to bear witness 
to the lofty truths on which the veritable life of 
man is established, and by which it moves on- 
ward, and shall move for ever. 
To love man is to love freedom; freedom for 
the body, conscience, reason, and soul of man, 
but freedom always self-limited by the law of 
love ; to prophesy freedom, the sister of obe- 
dience, over the world; to stand on its side 
against oppression; to support its causes, 
whether civil or religious, in all nations; and 
to allow no national interests, jealousies, no 
political expediencies, no personal desires, to 
prevent our allegiance to its flag. That was part 
of Christ's love of man. He fought for the free- 
dom of the soul, the reason and the conscience, 
against the tyranny of force and fraud. And the 
main purpose of his life was to set free the spirit 
of man from the oppression of wrong-doing, 
from the diseases of sorrow and unrest. 
♦ .f f» 55 



To love man is to love the idea of justice, equal 
handed, for all men, and to live in behalf of it. 
It is to love truth, the ground of all interchange 
of thought, and to live for it. It is to love self- 
surrender, the ground of all action between 
men, and to live it. It is to have, and live for, 
the simple humanities themselves — the vital, 
human elements which are common and beau- 
tiful in the race ; the charities which bind men 
together, until full consciousness of them 
makes us realize our unity. Moreover, to love 
mankind is to love and fulfil in our daily life 
those great and solemn ideas which Jesus 
Christ established for the spirit of man, and 
destined in the end to be universal in human- 
ity ; the idea of the Fatherhood of God, embrac- 
ing all ; the idea of the universal brotherhood 
of man which follows on our universal child- 
hood to the Father; the idea of the universal 
duties and rights of that brotherhood ; the be- 
lief in the universal aim which God has for His 
children— their perfection in Himself— which, 
ensuring their progress in Him, will, when ac- 
complished, fill with joy the eternal future of 
mankind. 

The love of these ideas — the great driving 
wheels by which the chariot of man's progress 
rolls in soundless thunder on its upward way — 
and the action which, if they are profoundly 
loved, must shape itself from them into daily 
life — is the practical love of Man, and it is as 
clear as the day what it means. That is no 
vague, unoutlined dream ; the wayfaring man, 
56 



though a fool, shall not err therein. To love 
these ideas is to do them; and the doing of 
these performs all the duties of Love to Man- 
kind. 

Lastly, there is one thing more to say. 
It is not enough to put religious thought, feel- 
ing, and conviction into shape in life. The shape 
we give them must be as beautiful as we can 
make it. It ought to have charm, to be attrac- 
tive, that we may draw men to the love of the 
good thing. Moreover, the thing itself— the 
good, just, and loving thing, having its own di- 
vine loveliness— demands that its form should 
be lovely, that the form should not contradict 
its essence. It was not enough in S. Paul's mind 
that we should give, but also that we should do 
it with simplicity. It was not enough that we 
should show mercy, but also that we should 
show it with cheerfulness. That the form of 
Christian action should be fitting, graceful, full 
of attraction, was of so great importance to S. 
Paul, and this he learnt from the ineffable grace 
of Christ, that the action, however good, was 
incomplete unless it was beautifully clothed. 
To do justice harshly, rudely, is to lose more 
than half its use. To do a loving thing in an 
ugly or a rough way, is to make the receiver 
of it think that it is not loving at all. To give 
as if we flung our gift at the head of the person 
to whom we give, is to create anger, and the 
sense of obligation ; not gratitude and affection 
in the heart of the receiver. To show mercy 
reluctantly or with careful reservations, is not 

57 



to show it so as to bless the giver and the taker. 
The form does not then fit the essential nature 
of mercy. 

There is a proper, beautiful way in which to 
shape all goodness and love ; and this we should 
strive to attain, if we would be perfect, if we 
would bring our religion into life in such a fash- 
ion as God shall approve and man desire. And 
if we do that, the least act, thus touched with 
immortal beauty, is remembered with affection 
from generation to generation. 
Moreover, doing the right or loving thing with 
this gracious charm, with fair words and fair 
ways, is one of the greatest helps we can give 
to religion in life. Religion then is shown in 
her beauty to the world, and the world, finding 
joy in the vision, is allured to follow her. Like 
pictures or lyrics left by a great artist to man- 
kind, are the beautiful forms of act and speech 
in which we have cast the tenderness and truth, 
the justice and mercy, the goodness, joy, and 
peace of our religion. 

Let us then make the workmanship of every 
religious word and act as lovely and delightful 
as we can ; nor indeed, if we love enough, will 
that be difficult, for love naturally seeks to 
make its form beautiful. And let us do this, not 
for our own sake, but for the sake of man, and 
not only for man, but most of all for the sake 
of God, whose essence is eternal Love. 
This which I have laid before you, is part of 
that mighty upward strife towards perfectness 
which is the religious ground and explanation 
58 



of human life, the duty, right, and honour of us 
all. It is also our greatest joy. It makes us in- 
cessant creators, and in creation the deepest 
delight of mankind is found and secured. More- 
over, it urges us towards the infinite, for only 
in infinity can we find room for expressing the 
perennial outgoings of Love into Beauty. 
We are never satisfied, when once we have be- 
gun to shape into outward life the spirit of God 
within us, that is, the Religion which we have 
within. We desire to give it lovelier and love- 
lier form ; our longing for the perfect kindling 
into brighter fire and joy and aspiration ; till, as 
we press forward, doing fairer works and no- 
bler acts, the ideal life of immortal perfection 
in God opens before us, like a sunlit heaven 
full of worlds unvisited. And this hope and 
vision God approves. We hear in the ears of the 
spirit a voice crying, *I have yet many things 
to show you, but ye cannot bear them now;' 
and as we believe that promise, beyond all that 
we do extends, far away, all that we shall do ; 
beyond the actual sweeps the vast curve of the 
ideal, beyond the limited illimitable perfection. 
In that faith, born of the noble shaping of in- 
ward religion into life, we live and die and are 
born again into that ideal life which is the no- 
ble end and eternal rapture of humanity. 



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